Developers creating apps for Windows Azure can now use Git in continuous deployment modes, and can integrate with projects hosted on CodePlex and GitHub.

Microsoft has announced a number of improvements to Windows Azure deployment, including a new low-cost shared mode scaling option, support for custom domains with shared and reserved mode web-sites using both CNAME and A-Records, continuous deployment support using both CodePlex and GitHub, and FastCGI extensibility.

The new “shared” scaling tier means you can deploy and host up to 10 web-sites in a free, shared/multi-tenant hosting environment. It is free for web sites that serve up to 165MB a day of content, or 5GB per month). There’s also a new low-cost “shared” option when you go beyond these limits.

If you’re running in shared mode you can now map multiple custom DNS domain names to it using CNAMEs and A-records. This lets you support “naked domains” with your websites, such as http://microsoft.com as well as http://www.microsoft.com.

Custom Domain support has also been improved with the ability to associate multiple custom host names to your Azure websites.

The support for continuous deployment with Git and CodePlex or GitHub is another improvement. It means you can automate builds and run unit tests every time you check in your website, and if they are successful automatically publish to Azure. This was available under the TFS option Microsoft shipped earlier this summer, and has now been expanded to include Git support with the option to integrate with projects hosted on CodePlex and GitHub.

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